Word: holte
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lost Love. Holt's basic complaint ever since has been that schools test, drill and grade children so often that they lose interest in the meaning of what is being taught, and schooling becomes a charade in which the students' real aim is to escape embarrassment and pain. By contrast, before he gets to school, Holt argues, a child has "a love affair with life." In fact, his attitude toward everything in the world about him is to "taste it, touch it, heft it, bend it, break it-and he is not afraid of making mistakes...
...Holt considers much of present schooling a degrading experience for both teachers and students. Children are compelled to work for "petty and contemptible rewards-gold stars, or papers marked 100, or A's on report cards -for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else." They fear a teacher's displeasure, the scorn of their peers, the pain of being wrong. "Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time...
...tell-'em-and-test-'em" process, Holt claims, not only induces fear and discourages experimentation but leads to a concentration on answers rather than problems-and it is "dishonest and the students know it." Teachers coach the kids for the tests and care more about "the appearance" of knowledge than for real understanding. "What would happen," Holt asks, "at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it." In this "temple of worship for right...
Beating the System. Holt has noticed that children react by employing clever stratagems to beat the system and find that right answer. They detect the way a teacher unconsciously leans toward the correct answer of several on the blackboard; a student looks confused or stays silent until the teacher keeps asking leading questions and almost answers himself; other students mumble answers, aware that the teacher is attuned to the right answer, and will assume it was given. They fence-straddle, avoid commitment, live for the teacher's approving "yes." It becomes so automatic, Holt writes, that when he selects...
...Holt argues that most testing should be dropped, since "the only answer that really sticks in a child's mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself." Students should have to learn only those things that really interest them. This would not be much of a hazard, Holt suggests, since for most people, "the things we most need to learn are the things we most want to learn." He thinks schools "could well afford to throw out most of what we teach, because the children throw out almost all of it anyway...